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Release 0.1

This release mostly involves setup and understanding of the Firefox extension creation. I used the template of development tool add-on that’s provided by Victor Porof.

Getting the System Setup

I am using a virtual machine (VM) as a development environment for the project. The VM contains Lubuntu, a light weight Linux distribution, and all the development tools required for developing add-ons for Firefox. The setup was pretty simple and did not give me any trouble.

Working with Extension

The initial installation of the extension did not work and Firefox was giving me a compatibility error.

This confused me because I had successfully installed the same extension before on the same version of the Browser. So I started searching through the files to find where the problem was. After a mildly frustrating search I found that the install.rdf file was the cause of the problem.

The above is the a snippet from the file and the problem was being caused by <em:minVersion>26.0a1</em:minVersion>. This tag was setting the minimum version of Firefox required to be 26.0a1. I updated this file to work with one version smaller than mine.

This fixed the problem and I was able to install the extension successfully and usingthe make latest command to build a new version. After the installation was successful, I started looking at the code and started to modify and understand it. After hacking at the code for a while I was able to workout how to modify it properly.

I am using Komodo Edit for modifying the various files and currently the extension is somewhat interactive. It allows the user to and text in the text box and click the submit button to see there name on displayed on the screen. Improvements and actual functionality will follow soon.